It's kind of ironic. I mean, editors chastize writers all the time for not following submission guidelines, yet editors aren't that much better. I just did a batch of verfications, and less than half the people followed the directions. That is worse than normal, but still, editors should be better at following the directions, right? After all, all they have to do in this instance is indicate what changes they want made. I don't care if you put the changes in a bulleted list, use brackets, bold, caps, or a combination thereof, but PLEASE show me what you want changed. I'm not that good a guesser, and I'm definitely not a mind reader.

Why is this such a big deal? When I get an email which says "Corrected listing below," and within that listing they don't indicate WHAT they changed, I have to do one of two things: 1) Compare their listing with the one in my database on a line-by-line basis to see what they changed. 2) Copy and paste the new listing in, format it, and then read through it and make sure they didn't add anything funky or misspelled something. Both of those options take a lot of time I would rather spend doing something else.

Then I get some listing verifcations that just make me smile because they are so easy to update. For instance, today's prize for Easiest Listing To Update goes to The Ledge Magazine. Their listing looked like this: Receives [60] mss/month. Accepts 3-4 mss/issue. Manuscript published 6 months after acceptance. Published [Xujun Eberlein,] Franny French, Clifford Garstang, [Richard Jespers,] Al Sims.

See how easy it is to pick out the changes? Since today even those people who did follow the directions (so far) didn't make things that clear, Pubilsher Tim Monaghan is one of my favorite people right now.

Okay, vent is done. Time for me to go back to my pile. ~Sigh~